The New York (Behind the) Times has just picked up on a trend that’s been going on since the early 1990s: “Evangelicals Find Themselves in the Midst of a Calvinist Revival.” Readers of the piece will learn that some of the hottest evangelical preachers are Calvinist, that John Calvin himself “did not read scripture literally,” and that Calvinists are sneaky—at least according to some opposite-leaning evangelicals who resent how their churches have been infiltrated.
Some of us theology nerds recall swapping links to a YouTube video called “I Think My Wife’s a Calvinist,” with insider lines like “She burned that Beth Moore book I gave her,” and clever entendres (“But that’s OK—I didn’t choose her; she chose me”). When people are writing song parodies about you, Johnny C., you’re definitely a trend. And a fad? The Times article ends with the speculation that Calvinism may end up on the been-there-done-that pile, along with the emergent church movement and the missional church movement.
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